Personal Blogs

“Have you read any good books lately?” My hairdresser always asks me this question. It is one of my favorite things to talk about, yet it always takes a long time to answer. 

Yes. Yes, I have read some astonishingly good books lately. 

The long, complicated, answer is inevitable because the word 'good' is so difficult to apply as a blanket label to books that I have chosen to read for so many different reasons; books that serve different purposes. A book might be (in my view) the most spectacular literary masterpiece to ever be scripted - it doesn't mean I enjoyed the story. A book might have made me laugh and made me cry - it doesn't mean it is necessarily academically brilliant or should be required reading. A book might have made me question big deep things about myself and could be argued to have been personally transformative - it doesn't mean that another reader will feel the same. 

Here is what my 2024 reading list has looked liked so far:

Under the Skin - Michel Faber

The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins

Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff

Why We Can't Sleep - Ada Calhoun

Beartown - Fredrik Backman

The Complete Stories - Anita Desai

Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes

Emma - Jane Austen

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

Night - Elie Wiesel

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

Lucky - Alice Sebold

The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

1984 - George Orwell

The Swimmers - Julie Otsuka

Brooklyn - Colm Toibin

About a Boy - Nick Hornby

Talking to the Dead - Helen Dunmore

Hang the Moon - Jeanette Walls

Slam - Nick Hornby

After This - Alice McDermott

The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold

Juliet Naked - Nick Hornby

About Love and Other Stories - Anton Chekhov

In a Lonely Place - Dorothy B Hughes

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen

Case Histories - Kate Atkinson

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

King Lear - William Shakespeare

Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng

The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson

Elizabeth Costello - J M Coetzee

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter - Kim Edwards

D - Michel Faber

Paradise Lost - John Milton

Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan

The Fire Gospel - Michel Faber

The Periodic Table - Primo Levi

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

Lady Oracle - Margaret Atwood

Major Works - Clare

Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married - Marian Keyes

Negotiating with the Dead - Margaret Atwood

The Women - Kristin Hannah

Poetics - Aristotle

The Outsiders - S E Hinton

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Some of these books sit on my A893 set text list. Some of them sit on my kids' High School and Middle School curriculums. Some of them came recommended by friends. Some of them were disrecommended by friends, which made them intriguing to me (especially as I then found some of them spectacular reads). Some of them have been considered controversial in some States meaning some school districts have banned them (I live in America, where apparently some people think that limiting literacy and limiting exposure to difficult topics is somehow good for the next generation... I mean... I can't even...). Some of them are funny. Some of them are artsy. Some of them are classics. Some of them were $1 impulse purchases from a thrift store. Some of them I have read again and again before. Some of them are first-time reads. Some of them took a week or two to work through. Some of them were read in a single sitting.

My summary - just read books. Read all the books you can. Be ok with not loving the same books as your friend or partner or neighbor. Be ok with mixing up the classics with 'trashy' holiday reads. Be ok with not understanding everything written down. Be ok with not having a favorite author. Be ok with being uncomfortable in what you read. 

Read. Read. Read some more. It’s never a mistake.

"These are the three questions most often posed to writers, both by readers and themselves: Who are you writing for? Why do you do it? Where does it come from?

[...] I began compiling a list of answers to one of these questions - the question about motive [...] They are all taken from the words of writers themselves [...] Here then is the list:

To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is forgotten. To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To satisfy my desire for revenge. Because I knew I had to keep writing or else I would die. Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are alive. To produce order out of chaos. To delight and instruct [...] To please myself. To express myself. To express myself beautifully. To create a perfect work of art. To reward the virtuous and punish the guilty; or [...] vice versa. To hold a mirror up to Nature. To hold a mirror up to the reader. To paint a portrait of society and its ills. To express the unexpressed life of the masses. To name the hitherto unnamed. To defend the human spirit, and human integrity and honor. To thumb my nose at Death. To make money so my children could have shoes. To make money so I could sneer at those who formally sneered at me. To show the bastards. Because to create is human. Because to create it Godlike. Because I hated the idea of having a job. To say a new word. To make a new thing. To create a national consciousness, or a national conscience. To justify my failures in schools. To justify my own view of myself and my life, because I wouldn't be "a writer" unless I actually did some writing. To make myself appear more interesting than I actually was. To attract the love of a beautiful woman. The attract the love of any woman at all. To attract the love of a beautiful man. To rectify the imperfections of my miserable childhood. To thwart my parents. To spin a fascinating tale. To amuse and please the reader. To amuse and please myself. To pass the time, even though it would have passed anyway. Graphomania. Compulsive logorrhea. Because I was driven to by some force outside of my control. Because I was possessed. Because an angel dictated to me. Because I fell into the embrace of the Muse. Because I got pregnant by the Muse and needed to give birth to a book [...] Because I had books instead of children [...] To serve Art. The serve the Collective Unconscious. To serve History. To justify the ways of God toward man. To act out antisocial behavior for which I would have been punished in real life. To master a craft so I could generate texts [...] To subvert the establishment. To demonstrate that whatever is, is right. To experiment with new forms of perception. To create a recreational boudoir so the reason could go into it and have fun [...] Because the story took hold of me and wouldn't let me go [...] To search for understanding of the reader and myself. To copy with my depression. For my children. To make a name that would survive death. To defend a minority group or oppressed class. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. To expose appalling wrongs or atrocities. To record the times through which I have lived. To bear witness to horrifying events that I have survived. To speak for the dead. To celebrate life in all its complexity. To praise the universe. To allow for the possibility of hope and redemption. To give back something of what has been given to me."

From: Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead; A Writer on Writing, Cambridge University Press 2002. pp.xix-xxii

I have a friend whose home is surrounded by wildflowers. She raises chickens and ducks. Her garden is planted with beans and squash and tomatoes and herbs. Each morning she watches the sun rise over a mountain range that can only be described as majestic. Her kids wear daisies in their hair and have their own little strawberry patch. Neighbors can swing by and pick up a box of eggs - each one comes with a pretty personalized stamp. 

(Now, if she were painting this picture she would tell you about the mud that gets dragged into her home by her dogs and kids. She would tell you about the deer that come and eat everything as it sprouts. She would tell you about the frost that destroys her first plantings meaning that she has to start over from scratch again and again. She would tell you that despite having an abundance of home-grown home-raised produce one of her kids would still rather eat just frozen processed chicken nuggets for every single meal, and that despite seeming to live in an idyllic rural haze, actually her kids do still occasionally draw on the walls with marker pens. She would tell you how hard it is to keep things alive in the high altitude dry summers and how hard it is to have to shovel snow day after day through the long winters just to get from her front door to her car.)

Depending on which version you read her life is either perfect or not perfect, and since both accounts above are real, we could conclude that perfect and not perfect are simultaneously true. It’s all very ‘Schrodinger’s Cat.’

“But, ah-ha,” she would say, “even in the ‘perfect’ version I have found something that is missing from my life.”

“How could this be?” We might reply. “You have flowers and sunrises and you are connected to the earth - surely you have everything you could ever want or need.”

“In my whole adult life,” she says, “I have never had a doorbell.”

And so a doorbell has been ordered. It is arriving tomorrow. 

We all know how a doorbell works. Someone (maybe a friend, maybe someone making a delivery, maybe someone who wants to buy a box of eggs) presses the button, there is a ring inside the house, and if the homeowner is home they open the door (or maybe they take a sneaky look through a window to see who it is and then decide whether to go ahead and open the door, or whether to crouch down and hide, pretending they are not home, because they really don’t want to deal with whoever is on the other side of the door at that moment - some people might do this, I’m not say I ever have, I’m just acknowledging that it is a possible scenario, maybe, for other people, or something…). A doorbell in itself is a simple, familiar thing. It won’t end up transforming my friend’s life - having someone knock on the door ends up achieving the same result (and in her case, her dogs, chickens, ducks and an old-lady turkey all raise the alarm with much excitement whenever a car pulls into the driveway, so the doorbell is actually going to be drowned out by the canine-poultry chorus that announces any new arrival anyway). The real excitement lies in the waiting. In wondering what having a doorbell is going to be like. Expectation. 

This morning I used a hair mask. It cost $3 from the grocery store. It is not fancy. I have used it before. I know how it works (or doesn’t). The results are typically minimal. I used it anyway. And as I sat with my hair covered in what is basically just a conditioner in a sachet for 2 hours I wondered if this might be the day that my hair ended up being softer and shinier than ever before, the sort of hair that turns heads. As expected, now that it is rinsed off and my hair is blow-dried, it is just as it always is. No better. No worse. 

Also this morning I baked homemade bread. I added yeast to warm water and watched it bubble up. I added flour, salt, oil etc and mixed it just like I have mixed bread before, and although I knew how it would (probably - I never really know with bread - I tend to oscillate between it being ok and it being bad) turn out I wondered if it might just be the most spectacular bread anyone had ever made. After 2 hours (same amount of time as the hair goo - honestly a coincidence - there was no intention in that) the bread was ready and we ate it, and as expected it was completely fine, but no-one’s life was changed. 

But still, I’d had hours of anticipation, and actually sometimes that is the real treat - the wondering. And so I hope my friend feels all the doorbell anticipation feels. In fact, I almost hope the delivery gets delayed a day, just so she can extend the happiness of looking forward to it, of wondering what life might be like post-doorbell. It will probably be the same as life post-hair mask, and post-bread. No better. No worse. Not perfect, but not not-perfect either. 

But in all of this, one thing emerges as being actually perfect. Perfect anticipation, perfect execution, perfect reward of satisfaction when the job is done. As I'm writing this my oldest child is picking up a new batch of eggs. They will taste delicious. But an equal joy (ok, a greater joy) will come from the moment when he brings them home. He will put them on the countertop and say "Mum, the eggs are here." And I will open the boxes (I buy 3 dozen at a time - these boy children will not stop eating) and I will take a few minutes just to stand and look and admire. 

Egg stamp, you are spectacular.

It turns out that most of the people I know in America are making use of some kind of cosmetic enhancement procedure. Some of them have undergone surgery - boobs, tucks, noses, cat eyes, things involving suction - but most of them are indulging regularly in treatments that are administered with needles and syringes. Botox, Baby Botox (which is not, as I had first assumed with a deep horror, Botox that is given to babies, rather it is just a smaller dose of Botox, the idea being that it is a more subtle way of paralyzing your face, rather than a very dramatic way of paralyzing your face), and lip fillers being popular options. 

Lip fillers average price $959, with need to repeat every year

Botox average cost $196 per 12-week treatment

Baby Botox average cost $300 every 2 months

The astute amongst you will be wondering why Baby Botox (which uses less product and does not last as long) is more expensive than actual Botox. I agree. This seems odd to me as well. All I can conclude is that cosmetic procedures make little sense, the costs of any and most medical procedures are nothing if not erratic, and I will also absolutely own that the research I conducted to provide these numbers involved a maximum of 3 minutes Googling and me using the first number I found from completely unverified sources. A bonus message here is ‘don’t believe the things you read on the internet.’ You’re welcome. 

I’ve never injected my face (dentist aside - but that has always been my gums not my face, so I don’t think it counts here). I look 44 because I am 44 and that makes sense to me, and my plan is to look 50 when I am 50, and look 86 when I am 86 and so on. You get it. But, being surrounded as I am with other 44 year olds who look like their faces are aging really well, and whose boobs are still lifted up high as the sky even after having 2 or 3 kids, it’s only natural (‘natural’ seems an ironic word to use in context of this topic) to wonder whether I’m missing a trick, to wonder whether a little injection here and there would actually work for me, suit me, be a wonderful self esteem boost (and in a culture that is keenly aware of mental health, surely a self esteem boost is something worth considering?).

I’ve never come close to pursuing this. 

Until yesterday, when I really thought it through. By mistake.

I’d just eaten a slice of pizza (ok, 2 slices) and was drinking a beer. It had been a long evening - a swim event for 400 kids that lasted 4 hours, plus warm up, plus set up, plus clear up, plus a week of begging families to please please please volunteer. Anyway, that was why sitting on a patio at 10pm with pizza and beer, my husband and the swim coaches was a nice place to be. I was considering beer number 2 when I felt a small itch on my upper arm. I put my cold beer bottle on the bug bite to try and calm it but when the itching spread I knew what was going on. All plans of the 2nd beer abandonned, we came home to the safety of antihistamine pills and the relief of a cold shower. By this time the itch (ok, hives - great big massive hives) were widespread. Itching isn’t dangerous. Annoying, yes, but that’s about it. What I did not like at all was the tingling, swelling lips and the numb face. (Spoiler alert - mainly for the benefit of my mother, who is one of my only blog readers, and who will also be panicking at this stage about the impending anaphylaxis - all breathing was fine and remained fine; this entire event happened yesterday and I’m still fine.) Although I know now that I am fine, I didn’t know at the time that I was going to keep being fine, and while I felt confident that no-one dies of swollen lips I knew they can die of swollen airways so this was a situation that needed very close monitoring. So I monitored. 

Mainly what I saw when I obsessively looked in the mirror, searching for signs of increasing or decreasing swelling or any new strangeness, was that the image staring back at me resembled something from a Netflix show I recently watched about botched plastic surgery. My face shape was too smooth and too still. My cheeks just had something fixed about them. It was as if the wrong part of them was somehow propped up. And my lips were held in an unintended duck pout that I was powerless to adjust. I tried smiling once. That was a mistake. No-one, especially me, needed to see that. 

Once the itching stopped and I had allowed enough time to go by that I was happy that I would continue to breathe through the night, I went to bed, hopeful that all would be ok by morning. I was covered forehead to knees in calamine lotion meaning I woke up white and flakey (very white and flakey - I had absolutely believed that my breathing safety was inherently based on being able to wear as many layers of lotion as possible - it was thick), to find the bathroom floor covered in pink splashes and the bedsheets dusted in a fine white powder (by ‘fine powder’ I actually mean lumps). I felt good and I had full sensation in my cheeks. But my lips were still yet to fully come down. They were not ‘lip filler gone wrong’ big, but they were definitely ‘lip filler’ big. 

When my husband got up I was already in the kitchen, coffee mug in hand, and doing pretty well (I thought) at not dribbling, considering these new large lips were creating a new logistics-of-sipping experience for me. 

“Well, we know one thing for sure.” My husband said as he glanced at me while filling his own coffee cup that he then went on to drink from in a boring standard-lips way. “The expensive injections look is definitely not for you.” I mean, he’s right. I’d looked truly hideous the night before and looked only marginally better now, so I supposed I’ll be forever grateful that I had this test run and will never deliberately look this way again. But what if I’d liked it? What if I’d been left wrestling with the idea of ‘investing’ all that money for all the rest of my life in my own face? Good job I didn’t think that. Good job it’s not the plan. Phew! 

(And now I just need to drop in reminders of what a wonderful, thrifty, content to be myself wife I am so when I casually mention the first edition signed copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath that I saw for sale in an antique bookstore this week, he won’t be able to help but conclude that this book is tremendous value for money - a lifetime of literary wonder for a mere fraction of the price of a distorted face - an investment, a saving, and definitely not frightening to look at...)